Maya 2018: MASH Dynamics

one of the best new things in Maya 2018 is the introduction of dynamics to mesh let's have a look how it works I've cleared the scene and created a small polygon cube and from that I will now create a mesh network to go on with the dynamics so instead of the linear layout here in the in the distributed node I'm gonna switch to grid and set up a grid of ten by ten by ten cubes and with that I will simply turn on or create a dynamic snowed-in mesh that will instantly make the whole thing dynamic you see that it has created an underground or a ground plane which comes from the bullets all that isn't used here and when I hit play now you see that all the cubes are dynamic and collide with a ground everything is fine so what else can we do with that in the example that I've shown the whole cube of cubes was tilted a little bit was rotated I can do that here by using a transform node the transform actually is supposed to to work before the dynamic so I'm gonna take it and drag it down so that it happens before the dynamics reading from the bottom here I could now use these values here to rotate the whole object accordingly but I can also right-click into this field here and create a little helper that allows me to that allows me to rotate this thing freely and use this as the starting points and now when I hit play you see that it takes the cubes from there and collides them with the ground another thing was the color that's an easy one I simply create a color node here and also I'm gonna drag it down so because I want this to happen before the transform actually and I will create maybe a crater node or so and set it up accordingly okay so here's our cube a colored cube now what's what's he underground in this example here we don't need a separator underground I can create one for display purposes I just scale up a polygon plane and move it down by minus 20 which is the setting when you look here in the bullet solver which is the setting of the built in ground plane so here is minus 20 is down from the from the origin we also have a normal gravid here that I could bump up to make this whole thing look a little bit smaller and something else that we had in the original scene was additional collision objects so let me create some of these collision objects and place them on the ground like so and now I would have to register these objects as these objects as collision objects here in the bullet solver under Collider objects so I'm simply using middle Mouse drag and drop to drag all these objects into this section here and now they can collide with all of these little cubes let me play that everything's fine to get a little bit more shadow I can turn on the ambient occlusion setting here so you see it's pretty easy to set up but there are more features that you can use for example when we look at the dynamics node here in the mesh you see that we have features like initially sleeping that means that all these objects are not dynamic at the beginning only when they when they are touched by something else but there's also another way of doing that down here you see a per points adjustment which means that you can drop objects and rules that help you set the values for individual points in the mesh simulation so that you could set the activity flat for each individual point depending on an influencer object for example let's let's do that so I'm right mouse button in this section here and create a new point adjustment and to get into the settings I just double click and you see here is the channel name that I want to influence in this example here it should be active and by default we're starting from a value of zero and we want to turn this into a value of one so you have a minimum and maximum for us it's just as its it is just a switch so that I said minimum and maximum to the same thing so where does that happen by default we could do a random setting but in this case I want to create a fall-off object that does that whole thing and now when I said it like this you see that these cubes that are in the fall of object start to simulate immediately and all the other cubes will not because they are not yet active they are at the start value outside of this influence object so they don't simulate and I can even do that interactively when I use the so called interactive playback that you will find on the effects shells of with interactive playback I can take this influence object and move it into the object and you see when I'm moving away from here the object stops immolating because it's you know the the influence or the change in the attribute happens where the at their original position so when I when I put the influence object back and you see that these objects start to simulate again so I can dissolve this whole thing here by doing this and when I move it away they stop simulating another way would be let me rewind that another possibility would be to say this random object here this influence object instead of the mode normal I'd switch it to the mode hat which will then turn on the activity and leave it there so it simply adds activity to these objects let's try it out with the interactive playback I take the object and move it in and now these objects once they are active they remain active and I can you know play around with it and dissolve them like this one here so that's an interesting fact that you can influence all of the properties of the individual points by influenced objects or randomness or other rules to make the whole dynamics simulation more controllable let's have a look at another example so let me create an piece of text here with my 3d text tool and 3d type I'm gonna turn it into let's say an Autodesk like so and I want to turn this into a dynamic simulation then I don't need to go into the mesh editor for that it simply said that in the mesh pulldown menu you will find under dynamics at Shell dynamics which will take this object here and turn it into a mesh dynamic object so from now on when I when I hit play you will see that the auto test becomes simulated is a is a dynamic object already and in the mesh editor we find this dynamic objects of course and I also find bullets all over here where can change the gravity for example to minus 30 to make this look a little bit smaller so that it falls a bit faster now what can we do with these letters here I can set up something where you know one object hits these Autodesk letters and then they become active in order to do that I will go to the dynamics section here and tell these objects that they are initially sleeping so by default they are not moving when I hit play they will only move when they are touched by another object now let me set that up by simply creating a small cube and then create another mesh network and instead of the distribute node are we gonna use the distribute node and I will you know turn down this distance here so that they all appear in the same in the same spot and that will then animate the number of points so at frame 1 it's gonna be 0 and at frame let's say a hundred 20 it's gonna be 60 points here so every 2 second we get a new point or get a new little cube that comes out of there from the distributed node I can use a random node to make them a little bit more make the whole thing a little bit more interesting and you can see from here that these cubes you know appear in random positions they are not yet dynamic we can do that but first before I start to do that I'm gonna create a transform node and troll object for the transform node so that I can move this whole thing around so I'm gonna take this object here move it up a little bit and I will animate the whole thing across this Autodesk word here so I'm gonna set a keyframe here for frame number one I'm gonna set a keyframe and then for frame 120 I'm gonna be back here something like so set a keyframe so that this whole thing while these objects appear is moving around and then after the animation is set I'm gonna turn this into a dynamic object by just creating this dynamics note here and then when I hit play you see that all these objects appear and as soon as they appear as soon as the points appear they will drop to the ground so how can we make it how can we make these cubes shoot towards the Autodesk word here and that is relatively simple in the dynamic settings you will find an initial velocities or initial velocity in this case here we can try a minus 200 in zet in the z direction so that they shoot and you see as soon as they hit these letters here maybe minus 200 a little bit too much - 100 maybe might be better even that is too much - 15 you get the idea so I'm I'm basically shooting with these letter C I'm shooting at the Autodesk letters and as soon as they collide with something they become active objects now let's have a look at another example now I've set up a bunch of cubes here but with a little bit more space in between and I'm gonna turn this into a dynamic simulation and let's have a look how that works okay so it's dynamic and it collides with the ground so I want to introduce something new and that is the constraints so here under point adjustments you will find the so called constraints constraints lines between the different points which tie them together and hold them together like so we can create such a constraint that by default double-click on it but if all you see the type is said to glue and these points are now glued together and let me simulate the whole thing and you see now it is once yeah maybe not a solid object but it's something that is stiffened with all these constraints the constraints can be breakable with an adjustable force so next time I simulate the whole thing you see that the depending on the force some of the constraints if not most of the constraints are breaking but some others remain intact and keep these points together because the force was not big enough I can also set this to be Springs for example and of course I can find just how these objects are constrained together so by setting these distances here I can set a maximum number of constraints and by that you know fine just the whole behavior of these things so let me load an example of these Springs here this is an example where we have an emitter which is a distribute node with an animated number of points and this emitter spits out points and they are then immediately connected with glue constraints with a certain stiffness and by that they form a more or less stiff object with which is emitted or created out of nowhere so that's a very interesting effect here so you see that the dynamics in mash gives you a lot of flexibility to simulate and to create things that you that you can't create otherwise so it combines the flexibility of the mesh motion graphics with a dynamic system

Channel: Roland Reyer

Views: 56,091

Keywords: Maya, Maya 2018, 3D, Autodesk, MASH

Id: YO_mMKA0xLg

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017